Content: Wow. How far great actors have fallen eh? Sean Bean at one point played one of the finest villains film had to offer as Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye, had memorable roles in blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings, The Island, Troy, and National Treasure, he played a central role as Lord Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones, considered to be one of the best television shows of all time, and now... this. What a bummer. Rant aside, Wicked Blood in a nutshell is about a young girl with no parents who gets caught up between two rival gang playing a game of tug of war for control of the small towns drug trade.

As we open the film we meet Hannah Lee Baker (Abigail Breslin), a quick-witted, smart young teenager who appears to be a social outcast (despite being cute and confident) that spends her days playing chess by herself out on her front porch. She lives with h...Read the entire review

What is Cinema attempts to capture and explore the meaning and allure of cinema as a whole within a paltry 78-minute running time. Given the limitations at hand, it's no surprise that Chuck Workman's film comes off as rushed, unfocused and unsatisfactory.

However, given that the documentary (Or, as the Blu-Ray blurb more accurately describes it, visual essay) spends a considerable amount of time and energy on experimental film while questioning whether or not narrative really is that important to creating cinema as a pure art form, it's highly possible that Workman attempted to create a similar experimental feel for his essay.

The doc jumps from one subject to another without much of a thread to seamlessly connect them together. From the value of experimental filmmaking to cinema history, we jump to whether or not documentaries can truly be objective. From there,...Read the entire review

Shock Waves is one of those 70s cheap genre exploitation flicks where the artwork promoting it is much better than the movie itself. It takes a killer premise, Nazi zombies bred to survive underwater come back decades after World War II to wreak havoc, and destroys it with a dull and lifeless execution, depthless characters, horrid acting and worst of all for such a film, uninspired and bloodless death scenes.

First of all, if you're going to come up with horror movie antagonists as awesome as underwater Nazi zombies, you better do something worthwhile with them beyond merely serving them as the monsters of the week. There isn't any motivation behind why they rise from the water and go after their victims other than "They're Nazi zombies, and they kill". If they were replaced with regular zombies, or literally any other set of monsters for that matter, would anything in...Read the entire review

Based upon the cult favorite 90's film fromdirector RobertRodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn is a new television program forthe ElRey network which simultaneously explores the origin and the story ofthatpop-culture film success as groundwork while adding in a new mythology,mystery, and characters to keep it fresh and original. Theseries has already received a renewal for a second season. For fans ofthefilmmaker Rodriguez this is an exciting new series that shows enoughpromise tobe a successful reboot and reinterpretation (while also honoring thefilm'slegacy as a fan-favorite slice of genre filmmaking). &nbsp;

Watching a movie that you've never heard of about a prison cell that may or may not have religious implications is a bit of a risk. Especially when you thrown in ghosts, crazy guards, flashbacks, and embalmed bodies. Not your light Friday night flick, or even your run-of-the-mill horror for that matter. So, needless to say, I had my doubts. The cast gave me some hope though, as the three main men have, at the very least, names I've heard of and some credit to their mild fame. Bruce Greenwood especially calmed my nerves a bit and got me on board, and I'm glad he did. Cell 213 wasn't the low-budget odd ball that I was expecting, nor w...Read the entire review

On My Way (Elle s'en va, 2013) is an engrossing French humanist drama starring Catherine Deneuve as a 60-something former beauty queen forced to confront estranged family relationships and her own general unhappiness when on a whim she abandons her livelihood and takes to the road. Directed by actress Emmanuelle Bercot (Cl ment) the deliberately paced film proves an ideal vehicle for Deneuve as she approaches the crossroads of old age - the part was written especially for her - and her subtle performance, expressing many unstated emotions, holds its story together.

Cohen Media's Blu-ray of On My Way, shot digitally, offers good picture and sound, as well as, among other things, an enlightening interview with Deneuve herself.

The MovieIn high school, I was not the kind of person to go out and hang with friends. I had friends, but that was mainly a school thing. Outside of school, I just was not that person. Thus, I spent many a Friday night hanging out at home watching episodes of the original Star Trek on a PBS station out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. I enjoy Star Trek (Next Generation especially) but I wouldn't consider myself a fan, and I certainly don't consider myself a Trekkie...Read the entire review

The MovieNick Frost is best known as the sidekick to Simon Pegg in an assortment of movies and TV shows, including Shaun of the Dead and Spaced, but he's carved out a nice little career on his own as well, with shows like Danger! 50,000 Volts! and smaller parts in many good films, like Pirate Radio and Attack the Block. Though he's certainly playing the funny fat guy most of the time, he's not relying on physicality to get laughs. He's good at getting you on his si...Read the entire review

Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and photographer Edward Burtynsky have enjoyed successful, productive careers both separately and as a team, using their combined visual talents to call attention to the world around us. Their first film collaboration was Manufactured Landscapes (2006), a showcase of Burty...Read the entire review

The found-footage horror genre has taken a beating over the past fifteen years since its spike in popularity, due to both critics of the gimmick and filmmakers who have overused it. Films such as Europa Report and The Bay prove that there's still plenty of inventive life left in the concept, though, if those behind the camera think outside the box about what their particular film will do differently -- both in theme and terror -- than its predecessors. The Jungle, an Australian import from The Reef's Andrew Traucki, is a prime example...Read the entire review
]]> Cimarron Strip: The Complete SeriesDVD Videohttp://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=64001
Thu, 19 Jun 2014 11:15:56 PDTRecommended

No, not this Cimarron Strip:

Cimarron Strip (1967-68) was instead an unusual Western television series starring Stuart Whitman. It was one of just three Western shows with episodes running in 90-minute time slots. The other two, The Virginian (1962-71) and Wagon Train (in its penultimate season only, 1963-64), alternated leads and/or had stories revolving around one-shot guest stars. But Cimarron Strip was unique in that in al...Read the entire review

Broadchurch (2013-present) is a very intelligent British crime drama with an unusual format, one that, for the most part, works very well. Its eight-episode first series/season focuses on the investigation of a single crime, and how that crime and its investigation, along with intense, exploitative media scrutiny, impact the small seaside community in which it is set. Though much of the focus is on the lead detectives, played by David Tennant and Olivia Colman, it's as much a Robert Altman/Alan Rudolph-type tapestry with similarities to the excellent Wallander, and with a dash of 24-type cliffhanger suspense thrown in.

The series became a minor phenomenon in Britain, its ratings improving steadily as it went along, and its critical and commercial success prompted both the commission of a second season as well as an American remake for Fox, Gracepoint, also to star David Te...Read the entire review

I've got to say, I wasn't expecting much from a romance starring Penelope Cruz &amp; Emile Hirsch, especially with Cruz running around Bosnia in a flack jacket &amp; Hirsch snapping photographs. Don't get me wrong, I respect both of them as actors, but I had a hard time imagining them as a couple. She was pretty brilliant in Blow and Vanilla Sky, while he did his best work in Into the Wild. But she's a Spanish hottie and he's an American schlub, how were they going to get around that? Turns out they never really did, but the movie worked anyway. Well, it kinda worked; it was an up &amp; down experience, ...Read the entire review

From producer Richard P. Rubinstein who was behind Tales fromthe Darkside comes another horror anthology series: Monsters.Filled with fun stories and the occasional clever twist endingMonsters is a fondly remembered show that aired for three seasonsstarting in 1989. Now the good folks at eOne have collected all72-episodes and released them in a very nice complete seriespackage. While the collection is lacking any extras, it's still amust-buy for fans of TV horror.

This is a horror show, but there are times when it has its tonguefirmly planted in its check, as evidenced by the opening thatstarted the show off each week. Starting high up in the air abovethe clouds, the camera zooms down to a house in a suburbanneighborhood. Moving in through the window a typical family is shown(from the back) watching TV. It turns out they aren't so typicalwhen the mother en...Read the entire review

Directed by Timo Vuorensola, 2012's Iron Sky is definitely one of the bigger and more successful crowd funded' pictures to have come out over the last few years. While it's true that only a portion of the film's finances came from its campaign and that there was more to it than just the generosity of would-be fans, it's interesting to see something like this come to fruition. Also interesting is the very premise for the movie: the Nazi's didn't go away permanently after the Second World War, they just relocated to the moon.

And that's where the movie starts. See, the current President Of The United States (Stephanie Paul doing a great Sara Palin) is coming up for re-election and a big part of the push behind her campaign is to put a black man on the moon. She's even got posters printed up that read Black on the moon? Yes she can!' To make this happen, she hires a ...Read the entire review

The Movie: Zombie movies are definitely a mixed bag, and there seems to be a higher proportion of awful material, as opposed to other genres. There's some good stuff out there, though, and although zombie actioner Code Red isn't without flaw, it does rise above the usual dreck.

John (martial artist/stunt man/actor Paul Logan) is an American special forces operative who is sent into Bulgaria to investigate an incident that appears to involve a corpse reanimating. His superiors have information about a gas attack toward the end of World War II that brought a lot of dead German soldiers back to life, and believe that a Bulgarian military warehouse is home to a cache of the nerve agent, long thought destroyed. (The prologue set in WWII is quite impressive, even absent the zombie material.)

John teams up with Anna (Manal El-Feitury), an American doctor at the base (which it seems NATO...Read the entire review

Surprisingly tired and rather obvious WWII study of moral and sexual corruption; a reworking of Senso. Cult Epics has released Black Angel (actually known as Senso '45; Black Angel is the overseas video title), the 2002 sex drama directed by Tinto Brass, featuring an evocative score by Ennio Morricone (certainly the most successful element of the movie), and starring Anna Galiena, Gabriel Garko, Franco Branciaroli, Antonio Salines, Simona Borioni, and Loredana Cannata. Based on Camillo Boito's novella, Senso, which Luchino Visconti very loosely adapted for his same-named classic in 1954, Black Angel ditches the original's Risorgimento time frame and moves the story of a wealthy married woman's lust-driven affair with a callow young military officer into the final days of Italy's WWII Fascist government. The results are explicit...and thoroughly fam...Read the entire review

Lots of words and film have paid tribute to the late Princess Diana through the years since her tragic death in a 1997 automobile accident, but like many others I would admit to knowing little about her relationships after her divorce from Prince Charles. It is in that area that the film Diana tends to look, and at one interesting era in general.

Based on a book from Kate Snell, Stephen Jeffreys (The Libertine) adapted it into a screenplay which Oliver Hirschbiegel (The Invasion) directed. Focusing on the period from 1995 when she met Khan to shortly before her death, Diana, Princess of Wales is portrayed by Naomi Watts (The Impossible). When the husband of her long-time ...Read the entire review

When I selected to watch this film I didn't know who Tinto Brass was. All I saw was a throwback style WWII movie about Nazis, Italians, sex, violence, romance, and ultimately humanity during an inhumane war. I love character movies set during this era, depictions of how individuals dealt with the horrors of war but also with every day problems, relationships, their careers, all during an extremely volatile and pivotal time. So I was intrigued & curious, ready for a dramatic World War love story. Well, like I said, I didn't know who Tinto Brass was, didn't know that he is the master of Italian erotica, that he uses sexuality to tell his...Read the entire review

]]> We Are What We Are (Blu-ray)Blu-rayhttp://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=62647
Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:38:22 PSTRent It

THE FILM:

Click an image to view Blu-ray screenshot with 1080p resolution.

In the opening scenes of We Are What We Are, the matriarch of the Parker family rushes to her truck in a downpour, tense and in fear. She soon collapses, striking her head before falling into a ditch, where she meets a watery end. Left without a wife is gruff Frank Parker (Bill Sage), a man of few words and little patience for his teenage daughters Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner) and young son Rory (Jack Gore). The Parker family at first seems to embody the stereotype of a ferve...Read the entire review

What an incredible thing the Omnibus television series was. 164 episodes ran from 1952-1961, each week offering special programming focusing on the arts, sciences, and human interest. It was hosted by British journalist Alistair Cooke and broadcast live. The elaborate nature of these shows is astounding to behold, and Cooke and his crew pulled it off week after week.

One of the many stand-alone segments from the late 1950s is isolated here, a unique one-off program titled Gene Kelly: Dancing, A Man's Game. The movie star and director has gathered together a gaggle of dancers, musicians, and athletes to illustrate the fundamental components of his chosen art form. Kelly both hosts and demonstrates, allowing his feet to do the talking ...Read the entire review

The brash, fearless aviator Jimmy Doolittle (1896-1993) was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life man. Not only was he a key figure in making planes safer and easier to control (becoming the first to pilot a cross-country flight using only on-board instruments), his courage and derring-do helped shaped the outcome of World War II as the capper for a highly decorated military career. Certainly a life as eventful as his would make for an interesting documentary. The Shelter Island DVD release Wings of a Warrior: The Jimmy Doolittle Story, unfortunately, is not.

Wings of a Warrior: The Jimmy Doolittle Story is directed and hosted by Gardner Doolittle, a former stuntman and a distant relative of Jimmy's. His film came out of the laudable need to tell all of Jimmy's story, not just his well-known World War II accomplishments. Although the film is very dry, straightf...Read the entire review

This movie's title, along with its tagline "Your Body, Their Experiment" pretty much sums up what it's about. Dave (Trevor Morgan, who you might remember as the kid who needed rescuing in Jurassic Park III) along with his girlfriend Jessica (Tessa Ferrer) are enjoying a trip to Los Angeles, though you can guess with this movie being titled Abducted that their fun isn't going to last very long. Sure enough, they are hanging out up at Griffith Park when they're suddenly both hit by tranquilizer darts. When they wake up, they're locked in a dark room stripped of everything except their underwear. They can see a bit of light creeping in under the door from the hallway outside, and hear people walking and breathing heavily, but they say nothing leaving Dave and Jessica at a total loss as to where they are or what their ...Read the entire review

Let's get one thing straight: Brian De Palma's latest film, Passion, is trashy and completely unbecoming of the talent involved. Keeping that in mind, I kind of enjoyed watching this purposely pulpy thriller, which uses Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace as pawns in a game of love and deception. McAdams climbs the career ladder as the manipulative Christine Stanford, a female advertising exec in a man's world. Rapace is up-and-coming ad designer Isabelle James, who draws Christine's admiration ...Read the entire review

The ShowMy 7-year-old daughter will watch just about anything with a puppy on or in it. The fact that she actually owns some ...in My Pocket toys, along with the fact that this series is titled Puppy in My Pocket made it a sure thing that she would be interested. Thus, she was pretty excited when we sat down to watch this set, which, thankfully represents the first seven episodes in the show (unlike most kids DVDs, which are best-of collections.) That ...Read the entire review

In defiance of all odds, Justin Bieber: Always Believing is a biography of Justin Bieber (who'd have thunk it?). Now, before we go any further, there are a few things that can be gathered immediately. You can tell that the biography is unauthorized because it says so in small print right on the cover. You can also tell that is was hastily slapped together because the folks behind it didn't take the extra nanosecond required to call it Justin Bieber: Always Beliebing. Finally, you can tell that it is completely and utterly unnecessary because it exists in a world where an authorized documentary / concert film dedicated to Bieber (Never Say Never) came out two years ago.

I know what you're thinking. Of course, a dweeby dude in his early 30s can't appreciate the talent that Bieber possesses. A doughy pile of meat, hair and failed dreams couldn...Read the entire review

On paper, Blood Of Redemption looks like a B-movie action fan's dream come true. Seriously, look at the cast: Dolph Lundgren, Billy Zane, Vinnie Jones and Robert Davi? That's kind of awesome, right? If nothing else, this should be a lot of fun. It's probably not going to win an Oscar but hey, eighty-five minutes of action with a fun cast is nothing to sneeze at. Unfortunately director's Giorgio Serafini and Shawn Sourgose screw up pretty much everything that they possibly can.

The story, such as it is, is a mess. When the film begins we meet a man who is yammering on about his past to a pretty woman. From here we learn that the man is Axel (Dolph Lundgren), and that he worked as an insanely loyal body guard for a mafia family lead by Sergio Forte (Robert Miano). When he is no longer able to take advantage of the protection that was once offered him, he decides to ca...Read the entire review

A documentary on a store? But darlings, this isn't any store - it's Bergdorf Goodman's, the venerable blue-chip retailer for Manhattan's elite class. Project Runway fans will likely lap up Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's, director-writer Matthew Miele's zippy 2013 examination of one of fashion's most iconic destinations. Those who don't believe that shopping is the be-all and end-all of human existence might be befuddled by this shallow portrait, however.

Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's opens with a dizzying collage of rapid-fire imagery (lots of time-lapse photography) and loads of admiring testimony from people who simply adore everything that Bergdorf's stands for. These include celebrities such as Joan ...Read the entire review

Back in 2011, William Shatner released a self-produced and self-directed a documentary in which he met up with the various actors to helm the various incarnations of "Stark Trek" over the years. Running just shy of two-hours, I said in my review of the feature, "While the intent of "The Captains" isn't always clearly realized, the side paths some of the interviews take are reason enough to warrant a viewing. The complete program is a bit too ambitious and could have used some more judicious editing and even for Trek fans, repeated viewings aren't really foreseeable." For me the big point of contention was it failed to live up to the potential, citing specifically Shatner's one-on-one with Leonard Nimoy in Mind Meld." Well, lo and behold, Shatner revisits "The Captains" with an all-new...Read the entire review

Wish You Were Here works best as a straightforward cautionary tale about a very plain, common-sense idea: dropping ecstasy and getting tanked in public while on vacation in a foreign land, no matter how carefree the trip, might not be the best way to go. The first foray into directing from Australian actor Kieran Darcy-Smith aims to accomplish more than this, of course, as it focuses on a man racked with guilt over his knowledge of what happened during the high period, along with gradually unfolding a suspense story that reveals a secret about the disappearance of one of his traveling companions. Despite a range of considerable performances from well-regarded Aussie actors and gorgeously photographed locations, this quasi-thriller ca...Read the entire review
]]> Zombie Massacre (Blu-ray)Blu-rayhttp://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=61447
Tue, 13 Aug 2013 19:15:37 PDTSkip It

The Movie:

Also known as Apocalypse Z and produced by none other than Uwe Boll, 2013's Zombie Massacre begins when a working class woman somewhere in an Eastern European factory heads home for the day. When she gets to her rundown apartment she has to tend to her father, an elderly man who appears to be terminally ill. She hears an explosion and heads to her balcony to check it out when she gets covered in a gooey substance that rains down from above. Faster than you can say Romero she turns into a snarling zombie, her eyes blood red and her hunger painfully obvious.

From this admittedly impressive opening, the movie segues to a group of American military types who answer to the President (Uwe Boll, who is actually pretty funny here in small doses), all of whom speak with obvious German accents. They're sifting through folders and looking at pictures of different age...Read the entire review

Generally speaking, moms have it good. They get the love, the flowers, and about a million representations of their greatness depicted in various film and TV productions. But where's the attention for the dads out there? Luckily, we have some sympathty for the joys and pains of fatherhood in the recent French-Canadian comedy Starbuck. The film deals with the situation a lovable loser finds himself in as he discovers that he's a parent - 533 times over.

Starbuck's lightly exaggerated story revolves around the middle aged, responsibility-dodging David Wozniak, winningly played by hangdog-faced Canadian actor Patrick Huard (Funkytow...Read the entire review

The more humble and reasonable among us don't like to dwell too often on it, but isn't it true that some part of any human being, no matter how generous, ethical, kind, or conscience-driven that individual may be, is a preening, self-regarding egotist convinced it's more important than anyone else and looking out exclusively for number 1? Fortunately for fans of TV comedy, Fiona Wallice (Lisa Kudrow), the ostensible therapist from whose "innovative modality" of three-minute Skype psychotherapy sessions the Showtime series Web Therapy derives its name, is anything but humble or reasonable. She belongs to an impressive lineage of TV personages -- self-involved, self-deluded examples of b...Read the entire review

Based on the 2003 short film of the same name, Todd & The Book Of Pure Evil debuted on Canada's Space Channel in September of 2010 and was picked up for broadcast in the United States by FearNet who started showing the series in August of 2011. While series' creator Craig David Wallace worked on the short film with Max Reid, for the TV version he teamed up with Charles Picco and Anthony Leo, more or less recasting the movie for the small screen version. The second season was aired a year later, and as of right now, it looks to be the final one.

For those unfamiliar with the series, it revolves around a dopey pot smoking teenage boy named Todd Smith (Alex House) who loves heavy metal and getting high. He hangs out with his awkward but well-meaning best friend, Curtis Weaver (Billy Turnbull), a chubby kid with a fake arm. Todd periodically seeks advice from three...Read the entire review